Beijing International Auto Show: The Grammar of Grille

Chinese car buyers adore cars with chrome grilles, the more garish and gothic the better. To walk through the Beijing auto show, continuing through May 2, is to be confronted at every corner with a Chinese domestic automobile jeering at you with a mouthful of bling.

“It’s all about face,” said David Goggins, an executive with FAW-Volkswagen, one of innumerable joint ventures between Western carmakers and the Chinese. “It’s about how you show off.”

“It’s purely about status,” agreed Anthony Williams-Kenny, the British global design director for the Chinese conglomerate SAIC. “It’s about telling people ‘I’m important, I’m successful, I’m at the top rung.’ ”

One-upping your fellow motorists may have practical advantages too, in China, where the rules of the road are negotiated in real time, at real speeds – particularly at unregulated intersections. Studies have shown that drivers worldwide tend to yield to the driver of the more expensive, prestigious automobile. The hauntingly overlarge grilles of Chinese vehicles may be a kind of defensive driving technique.

For American car enthusiasts schooled in the chromic excesses of General Motors designer Harley Earl and Chrysler’s Virgil Exner, the Chinese love of big grilles resonates. Like America in the 1950s, China – at least, the Eastern part – is swimming in new wealth after a period of scarcity. “Suddenly, people can buy stuff,” said Mr. Goggins. “And no one is quite sure how long all that is going to last, so it’s a kind of feeding frenzy.”

And yet, the results may strike Western auto connoisseurs as ridiculous. The most egregious example could be the Geely Excellence Emgrand, which the company describes as the “perfect interpretation of Chinese classical aesthetics.” The Geely’s grille is somewhere between an evaporative cooler and an enormous Norelco shaver, with huge semi-circles of vertical chrome pushing – crowning, if you like — through the sheetmetal. Should the grille, and the six-meter car behind it, leave any doubt, there’s a sculptured hood ornament as big as a man’s fist.

The Chines love of big, declarative grilles could be, for Western luxury carmakers scrambling for market share, auspicious. Cadillac, Audi, Buick and Bentley, among others, have a front-end design language that emphasizes status and recognizability. Cadillac’s Ciel concept car, and Bentley’s EXP9 concept SUV, both have brilliant, gloriously graphic faces.

And Western designers are not above pandering. “When we went to [Bentley chairman Dr. Wolfgang Durheimer] with the design choices for the SUV,” says Bentley designer Robin Page, “We said, ‘It can be more British country utility or more Shanghai limo.’